In the Track of the Trades: The Account of a Fourteen Thousand Mile Yachting Cruise to the Hawaiis, Marquesas, Societies, Samoas and Fijis

What compels a man to point a small yacht toward 14,000 miles of open ocean? Lewis R. Freeman answered that question in 1912, when he and a crew of five aboard the Lurline set sail from San Pedro, California, into the vast blue silence of the South Pacific. This is not a cruise ship itinerary rendered in prose. This is the real thing: a handmade voyage across seas that had no weather forecasts, no GPS, no rescue helicopters waiting on standby. Freeman chronicles the passage through Hawaii, the Marquesas, the Societies, Samoa, and Fiji with an eyewitness urgency that modern travel writing has largely lost. He records the moment the trades catch the sails, the terror of a lee shore in darkness, the strange luxury of anchorages where no other yacht had dropped a line that season. But the real discovery lies in the islands themselves: the tattooed Polynesian navigators, the volcanic silhouettes rising from morning mist, the weight of cultures that had never seen an American. A century after its publication, this account endures because Freeman understood that the Pacific is not a backdrop but a character.